Basking in the wonderful glow of an Oscar win for Black Panther and an Emmy nomination for The Mandalorian, Ludwig Göransson has kept himself very busy, scoring one of the years most anticipated films, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and working on season two of The Mandalorian which comes our way October on Disney Plus.
Göransson recognized what it was that Favreau was looking for in The Mandalorian score—simply put, something that was exciting and new. Heading into a universe most closely associated with the work of a legendary composer—five-time Oscar winner John Williams—Göransson also knew that he had his work cut out for him. “What John Williams created for Star Wars was probably the best film music out there—at least, the most known film music. I remember watching the movies as a kid and the impact the visuals and the music had with me,” he says. “I can still remember that feeling, and it was that feeling that I wanted to try to recreate.”
Naturally, one challenge for Göransson on the project came with the recognition that his music would be compared to that of Williams, one of the all-time greats in the craft of composing, who has left an indelible mark on Star Wars. “Obviously, no one’s going to write music that is as great as what John Williams did,” the composer notes. The goal, then, for Göransson, was to hit the mark he sets for himself with his own work, and follow his own sense of what worked best for the show at hand. “I set a very high bar, [in] that every piece of music needs to hold a certain class, and needs to be, in itself, interesting. And also, even if it at times sounds easy, there’s always something that I would say is clever about it,” he says. “I put a lot of thought in every piece of music, [so] that it has some musical value to it.”
For Göransson, the highlight of Season 1 was simply being able to see his music come to life on the scoring stage. “I was so lucky on the show, where every episode, we recorded with a 70-piece orchestra, with the LA Studio Symphony at Fox. That’s one of my favorite parts of the process, when you’ve written all this music and you get to the stage, and you’d be able to hear 70 people putting their human touch, playing their instruments and really making it come alive,” he says. “Especially for something like Star Wars, that was incredibly needed, and you can really tell the dynamic that comes with that. It really makes a difference.”
Currently, the composer is in the middle of his work on the highly anticipated second season of the Disney+ hit. “We started a couple of months ago, and I’m extremely excited,” he shares. “Jon’s taking the story into places that I didn’t know existed, and I think it’s so fun.”
